We realize that our readers will evaluate the results of our investigation through their own perspectives. In the course of our reporting, we saw how easy it was for observers to project onto the confirmation process whatever they wanted to believe. Even without a fuller sense of the facts, many had already made up their minds.
It is hard—maybe impossible—to set aside personal history or political orientation when considering the questions about Kavanaugh. If Kavanaugh mistreated Ford and Ramirez but has conducted himself honorably in the past thirty-six years, does he deserve to be on the court? If there is not dispositive proof that Kavanaugh engaged in such misbehavior, were the accusations enough to eliminate him from consideration? Was his temperament during the last day of testimony in itself disqualifying?
We leave those conclusions to our readers. No doubt they will be debated for many years to come.
Kavanaugh had worked his whole life toward a Supreme Court nomination. He had studied at prestigious schools, apprenticed himself to powerful mentors, mastered Washington politics. He had also remembered his origins, staying true to old friends and maintaining his Catholic traditions. But nothing had prepared him for the perils he would face in the next few weeks. Those would be an education of a very different kind.
Despite the structure and high expectations, however, Prep, like most high schools, also had its seamy side. Students could be cruel and combative, and competitive. Tensions sometimes became inflamed on the weekends because of excessive drinking. Many of the Prep boys were also ill-equipped for socializing with girls. An environment with limited sex education, no female students, and just a handful of female educators, some alumni say, became a breeding ground in the early 1980s for a casual brand of misogyny.
Among Prep’s alpha males, there was a sense of entitlement—over girls, younger students, smaller boys, public school graduates, and non-athletes. A military-style social hierarchy was immediately evident to freshmen. First-years were treated like plebes, to be picked on and pushed around by the upperclassmen, some of whom had suffered the same hazing rituals. The more diminutive students were sometimes deposited into campus trash cans or stuffed into lockers. The bigger boys and those who had standing because of older brothers or ties to Mater Dei were inoculated.
Tom Downey, who was a larger kid but had a smart mouth, was taped to the front of a locker his freshman year after telling members of the wrestling team that their practice room smelled bad. William Fishburne, a petite boy who had come from public schools, was shoved from behind into one of the full-height gym lockers. He still remembers the sense of claustrophobia inside.
The upperclassmen knew better than to harass freshmen when faculty members were around, given the threat of JUG, calls to their parents, and stern lectures from the dean of students or their coach. But in the more private corners of Prep’s campus, bullying was common.
“Violence in general was part of the culture,” said a member of the class of 1984, adding that faculty looked the other way. At one point, the alumnus said, a sophomore repeatedly put him into headlocks. “At first it was fun, then annoying,” the former student recalled. “I asked him to stop. He would not. The faculty and staff knew what was happening, and did nothing. It was understood that you had to ‘sort it out yourself.’
“So I did,” he continued. “The next time he tried to grab me, I connected with his nose, which exploded in blood. I was in tears, convinced I would be expelled. The next day, a teacher close to me said, ‘I understand you took care of something.’ Everyone knew, and nobody said a word. It was completely acceptable.”
Ford felt compelled to share her experience with officials in Washington. She wanted her memory of being assaulted by Kavanaugh to be considered in the decision-making process, even if the president and lawmakers ultimately concluded that her experience was too dated or irrelevant.
“I just felt like I needed to tell them what happened,” Ford said later. “If this is the only bad thing he’s ever done, okay, people are going to decide what they’re going to decide. And I don’t know if this is the only bad thing. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, he did this to me, therefore he shouldn’t be on the court.’ I wasn’t in that place at all. That wasn’t how I was thinking about it.
“He did something to me when I was my kid’s age,” she continued, adding of government decision makers, “and I thought they should know, in case they care.”
Ford realized that Kavanaugh’s conduct might not have continued after high school, that she had “no idea what he was like as an adult,” and “he could have been Mother Teresa.” But she believed that the assault she remembered should be disclosed nonetheless.
To someone with more life experience, thicker skin, or a stronger sense of self at the time, the encounter might have been unremarkable—juvenile behavior by a bunch of boys. Indeed, to Kavanaugh himself, it may well have been just a little harmless, drunken fun. But to Ramirez it was devastating, affirming the very self-doubt she had hoped to conquer by facing down Yale in the first place: that she wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, rich enough, savvy enough, or tough enough to belong there.
In debating whether to cooperate with the New Yorker story, Ramirez ultimately realized she had two choices: come forward and join Ford or stay silent. “Which one can I live with?” Ramirez said she asked herself. “I knew I couldn’t live with my own self-judgment and blame of knowing I did nothing at all.”
But while her initial motivation was to stand with another survivor, she ultimately realized she was also standing up for herself. “It wasn’t altruistic by the time it was done,” she said. “I was doing it for me, too.”
Ford was forced to walk that fine line commonly navigated by women: appearing firm and confident without coming across as strident, unlikable, or unstable. Ford prevailed. Her equanimity would later be contrasted with Kavanaugh’s overwrought delivery, which, ironically, was forgiven by many as understandable passion in the heat of self-defense.
In an odd coincidence, Kavanaugh’s mother, Martha, as a judge had been involved in a 1996 foreclosure case over the Blaseys’ house in Potomac; after the couple settled with their mortgage lender, Martha dismissed the case, enabling the Blaseys to keep their home. At another point, Ralph Blasey had been president of the Burning Tree Golf Club, an all-male establishment in Potomac, where Ed Kavanaugh was also an active member.
Because of these ties to Kavanaugh’s world, Ford had avoided sharing her story with her parents as long as she possibly could. But now she could no longer protect them.
The exchange with Klobuchar, even in light of the Clinton reference and the Graham outburst, would be regarded by many as a new low point in the Kavanaugh hearings. As damaging as the Ford allegations were, as excruciating as it had been to watch her, and as exercised as Kavanaugh had been up to then, nothing had appeared quite so impertinent as him turning the tables on a senior female senator who had just opened up about her own family history with alcohol.
Klobuchar, after all, was effectively interviewing Kavanaugh for a job as his superior in that context. She was using compassionate, deferential language and requesting honest answers. Yet Kavanaugh pounced on her, perhaps hoping to give her a sense of the personal anguish and humiliation he was experiencing.
“You don’t go to where they are when they’re acting that way,” Klobuchar later said in an interview, likening her unruffled response to needing to “take away the keys” from an inebriated driver. As a prosecutor, she said, she was trained to let the witness continue talking rather than interrupt or assist. Still, “I just thought he would apologize to me,” she added, “because it was so bad.”
After an unexpected break in the hearing, Kavanaugh did, in fact, apologize, looking tearful as he did so. “Sorry I did that,” he said. “This is a tough process. I’m sorry about that.”
Despite the occasional concessions—“Sometimes I had too many beers,” for example, and the apology to Renate Dolphin—many of Kavanaugh’s classmates from both Yale and Georgetown Prep felt he had shown a lack of candor. Like Ludington, they had observed Kavanaugh drunk and seemingly out of control at times. They had been that drunk themselves and believed they would admit it under the same circumstances. Anything less, these people felt, would be fundamentally dishonest—an unforgivable trait for a Supreme Court candidate.
On September 30, the Sunday after the contentious hearings, Ludington put out a statement. “I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18- or even 21-year-old should condemn a person for the rest of his life. I would be a hypocrite to think so,” Ludington wrote. “However, I have direct and repeated knowledge about his drinking and his disposition while drunk. And I do believe that Brett’s actions as a 53-year-old federal judge matter.”
He continued: “I can unequivocally say that in denying the possibility that he ever blacked out from drinking, and in downplaying the degree and frequency of his drinking, Brett has not told the truth.”
It was important to Ludington—and other Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s—to emphasize that he was not objecting to the drinking; he was objecting to the dissembling.
This was where the hearings came to feel like Rashomon. Was Kavanaugh a misogynist lush who lied under oath about how much he drank? Or was he simply a brainy frat boy? In the intensely tribal politics of 2018, there was no such thing as somewhere in between; Kavanaugh became a human Rorschach test. Depending on their ideological perspective, people projected onto Kavanaugh what they needed him to be—a tragic casualty of #MeToo run amok, or the consummate symbol of white male privilege, triumphing yet again.
There is a compelling argument to be made that—particularly in the age of #MeToo—a more empathic, enlightened response was called for from Kavanaugh. He perhaps could have acknowledged the possibility that he had been involved in the Ford incident but not remembered it. He could have apologized for any harm done to Ford, condemned sexual assault, and encouraged victims to come forward.
But, particularly in the age of Trump, such a nuanced response would likely have doomed Kavanaugh’s nomination. President Trump—whose MO in the face of sexual misconduct charges was to fight them—was looking for a forceful blanket denial. There was no room for ambiguity or nuance; any cracks in the judge’s claims of innocence could allow Democrats to frame his words as an admission of guilt. He couldn’t be a flawed human being, apologize to people he may have hurt in the past, and vow that he’d grown up and perhaps seen the error of his ways. It had worked for George W. Bush in explaining on the campaign trail his decision to stop drinking at age forty. But in the age of Trump, it was no longer an option.
“The only way this guy could survive was to go full Trump,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who is now a writer and political commentator. “Once the bottom fell out, his only lifeline was to become a full-on Trump Republican. I saw that as a metaphor for what’s happened to the entire Republican Party: they try to keep their dignity, but when push comes to shove, they have to resort to Trump.
As people, our gut reaction was that the allegations of Ford and Ramirez from the past rang true. As reporters, we uncovered nothing to suggest that Kavanaugh has mistreated women in the years since.
Ultimately, we combined our notebooks with our common sense and came to believe an utterly human narrative: that Ford and Ramirez were mistreated by Kavanaugh as a teenager, and that Kavanaugh over the next thirty-five years became a better person.
“Had it been in a different venue—privately, and without so much on the line as it relates to the political direction of this very country—then perhaps both of them could have been more genuine in terms of why they were there and why they were speaking about this incident,” said Joe Conaghan, a Prep classmate who signed a letter of support for Ford but nonetheless backed Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
“And if I’m right about what I suspect was true, which is that she was telling the truth,” Conaghan added, “then perhaps Brett would have been able to render an apology to her that might have helped her heal in a real, genuine way. But as it stands in my mind, neither one was healed by the incident, because it was so politicized.”
